Putting Imaging Under the Microscope

At the Cornell University Integrated Microscopy Center in Ithaca, N.Y., the imaging system is based on an Axioplan 2 microscope from Carl Zeiss and a SensiCam camera from the Cooke Corp. of Auburn Hills, Mich. A look at the center's recent equipment improvements reveals underlying trends that affect everyone who wants to transfer an image from a microscope into a computer. These developments include better hardware, improved interfaces and more capable software.

The setup helps the center's director, Mandayam Parthasarathy, in his cytoskeleton studies and others in various branches of biomedical research. For Parthasarathy, one of the most recent -- and most beneficial -- innovations has been in camera hardware, a tunable liquid crystal filter from CRI Inc. of Boston. The filters, he said, allow the black-and-white SensiCam to produce both high-quality color images and quantitative scientific black-and-white images…